A continuing series featuring facutly who teach first year SCCO students, meet Rima Khankan, MS, PhD.  Of special interest is her role with interprofessional education involving optometry, pharmacy, and physican assistant students together.  What follows later in this article is her description of the virtual learning technology,  Anatomage tables.  Click on the image below,  a link to a video hosted on Vimeo where you will get to know Dr. Khankan.

As an optometry student, you may be wondering why a learning system is important to a student whose goal is to study only the eye and vision.  Because the optic nerve that exits from the back of the eye and carries neural input to the brain travels through so much “cranial real estate” to get there, pathology that affects the brain will also impact the optic nerve causing defects in a patient’s visual field.  The optometrist needs to study neuroantomy and especially how it integrates with the optic nerve.  Because this learning technology is able to generate enhanced views of the brain, it is especially effective for teaching optometry students not only the optic nerve, but the bony ocular orbit, its innervation and vasculature supply.  In general and  as a healthcare provider, the optometrist needs to know general human anatomy and physiology as well.  Because this learning technology can generate highly magnified and enhanced views of the entire body,  it accomplishes many learning objectives. 

Here is a video where Dr. Khankan discusses the Anatomage learning technology and how she uses it as a teaching tool with interprofessional education of the optometry, physician assistant and pharmacy students together :  Click here to watch the video on Vimeo.

Rima Khankan, MS, PhD